The Greater Bai or simply Bai languages () are a putative group of

Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages ...

proposed by Zhengzhang, a linguist, in 2010, who argues that Bai and Caijia are

sister language In historical linguistics, sister languages are cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, their so-called proto-language. Every language in a language family that descends from the same language as the oth ...

s.Zhèngzhāng Shàngfāng ��张尚芳 2010. Càijiāhuà Báiyǔ guānxì jí cígēn bǐjiào ��家话白语关系及词根比较 In Pān Wǔyún and Shěn Zhōngwěi ��悟云、沈钟伟(eds.). Yánjūzhī Lè, The Joy of Research ��究之乐-庆祝王士元先生七十五寿辰学术论文集 II, 389–400. Shanghai: Shanghai Educational Publishing House. In contrast, Sagart (2011) argues that Caijia and the Waxiang language of northwestern

Hunan Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangx ...

constitute an early split off from

Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...

.Sagart, Laurent. 2011
Classifying Chinese dialects/Sinitic languages on shared innovations
Talk given at Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale, Norgent sur Marne. Additionally, Longjia and Luren are two extinct languages of western

Guizhou Guizhou (; Postal romanization, formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked Provinces of China, province in the Southwest China, southwest region of the China, People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the pr ...

closely related to Caijia (Guizhou 1984).Guizhou provincial ethnic classification commission ��州省民族识别工作队 1984. ''Report on ethnic classification issues of the Nanlong people (Nanjing-Longjia)'' ��龙人（南京-龙家）族别问题调查报告 m.s.Guizhou Province Gazetteer: Ethnic Gazetteer ��州省志. 民族志(2002). Guiyang: Guizhou Ethnic Publishing House ��州民族出版社

Languages

The languages are: * Bai *

Cai–Long languages The Cai–Long () or Ta–Li languages are a group of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in western Guizhou, China. Only Caijia is still spoken, while Longjia and Luren are extinct.Hölzl, Andreas. 2021Longjia (China) - Language Contexts ''Langu ...

:Hölzl, Andreas. 2021
Longjia (China) - Language Contexts
''Language Documentation and Description'' 20, 13-34. Caijia, Longjia, Luren Hölzl (2021) shows that Caijia, Longjia, and Luren are all closely related to each other as part of a linguistic group that he calls ''Ta–Li'' or ''Cai–Long''. Bai has over a million speakers, but Longjia and Luren may both be extinct, while Caijia is highly endangered with approximately 1,000 speakers. The Qixingmin people of

Weining County Weining Yi Hui and Miao Autonomous County (; Xiao'erjing: ) is a county of Guizhou, China. It is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Bijie. Notable attractions include Majie Ethnic Yi Village () and the historic site of Shi ...

, Guizhou may have also spoken a Greater Bai language, but currently speak Luoji. Similarities among

, Waxiang, Caijia, and Bai have been pointed out by Wu & Shen (2010). Gong Xun (2015) has suggested that Bai may be an outlier Sinitic language with a Qiangic

substratum In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or sup ...

, noting that Bai has both a Sino-Bai vocabulary layer and a pre-Bai vocabulary layer. Gong (2015) also suggested that the

layer in Bai is more similar to early

3rd-century The 3rd century was the period from 201 ( CCI) to 300 ( CCC) Anno Domini (AD) or Common Era (CE) in the Julian calendar.. In this century, the Roman Empire saw a crisis, starting with the assassination of the Roman Emperor Severus Alexander ...

central varieties of Old Chinese in Ji, Yan, Si, and Yu that display the phonological innovation from

*l̥ˤ- > *xˤ-, than to the eastern Old Chinese varieties (i.e.

Qingzhou Qingzhou () Wade–Giles: Tsing-chou, sometimes written as Ching-chow-fu, formerly Yidu County (Yitu) (), is a county-level city, which is located in the west of the prefecture-level city of Weifang, in the central part of Shandong Province, Chin ...

and

Xuzhou Xuzhou (徐州), also known as Pengcheng (彭城) in ancient times, is a major city in northwestern Jiangsu province, China. The city, with a recorded population of 9,083,790 at the 2020 census (3,135,660 of which lived in the built-up area ma ...

, etc.) that later impacted

Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...

, which show OC *l̥ˤ- > *tʰˤ- > MC th-. This east-west dialectal division in Old Chinese has also been noted by Baxter & Sagart (2014:113-114).

References

{{Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan languages

Languages

See also

References